Before You Begin:

If your Brush Presets and Brush Settings Panels aren’t visible, go up to the Window Menu and turn them on.

You’ll need your Actions Panel later on so you can open that now or wait until STEP 6.

The “Oatley Wiggles Brush” selected in the Brush Presets Panel and saved at the default angle.

Start with a brush that is NOT perfectly round.

…maybe it’s a messy texture brush, a flat brush or a brush shaped like a calligraphy pen.

I’ll be working with my own custom “Wiggles” Brush because it’s a little bit of everything.

I recommend working through this tutorial with my Wiggles Brush before you try it with your own brushes.

You can DOWNLOAD all of the Brushes and Actions created in this tutorial in a section near the end of this post.

STEP 1: Save The Brush In A Horizontal Position:

Use the Brush Tip Angle Control in the Brush Settings Panel to rotate the brush to a completely horizontal position.

Use the Brush Tip Angle Control in the Brush Settings Panel to rotate the brush into a completely horizontal position.

*Because the default position (a 0° rotation) of my Wiggles Brush is perfectly vertical, I’ll use a 90° or -90° angle. (This might not be the same if you’re using a different brush…)

To save the first Brush Angle, click the New Brush Preset Icon at the bottom of the Brush Presets Panel.

To save your first Brush Angle Preset, Go to the bottom of the Brush Presets Panel and click the little icon that looks like a piece of paper with a folded corner.

Photoshop will open a tiny window and ask you for details (image below).

Add “Angle_U_D” to the Name of this first Brush Angle Preset.

“U_D” is short for “Up & Down.”

SUPER-IMPORTANT: If, in your version of Photoshop, you see a little checkbox that says “Capture Brush Size In Preset” be CERTAIN you un-check the box BEFORE you save each brush angle!

Name the brush “BrushName_Angle_U_D” and un-check the box and DO NOT capture the Brush Size!

*If you accidentally capture the brush size in the preset, your brush will pop to a different size when you rotate it. That undermines the point of this tutorial, which is to create a smoother workflow.

Your new Brush Angle Preset.

…which is super-annoying.

Click “OK” to save the Brush Angle Preset.

You’ll see the new brush appear at the bottom of your Brush Presets Panel.

Good job!

Three more to go.

STEP 2: Save The Same Brush At A 45° Angle:

Now rotate the brush to a 45° angle and save it as “BrushName_Angle_UR_DL”

Now rotate the brush to a 45° angle like this:

Call this one “BrushName_Angle_UR_DL” which means “Up-Right” and “Down Left”

Click OK.

…and don’t forget to un-check the “Capture Brush Size” box!

STEP 3: Save The Brush In A Vertical Position:

Rotate the brush to a vertical orientation and save it as “BrushName_Angle_L_R”

Now, rotate the brush vertically.

Save this brush as “BrushName_Angle_R_L”

Of course, this means the brush angle is pointing Right and Left.

Did you click “Capture Brush Size In Preset”?

No? Good job.

We’re almost done saving brushes…

STEP 4: Save The Reverse 45° Angle:

Save the last Brush Angle Preset and call it “BrushName_Angle_DR_UL”

Save your “Angle_DR_UL” for “Down Right and Up Left” and you’re done saving brush angles!

After this method “clicks” in your mind, you’ll easily be able to add more brush angles.

But let’s keep it simple for now and just use these four.

STEP 5: Try Rotating Your Brush:

Select your “L_R”Brush Angle Preset from the Brush Presets Panel.

Press the “.” or “,” key on your keyboard.

Those keys will toggle through the Previous/ Next Brush Preset.

Boom.

Now you have Brush Rotation hotkeys!

Mo’ Brushes, Mo’ Problems:

You’ll probably want to set up rotation for a bunch of different brushes.

…and you’ll probably want to create more subtle “intermediate” brush angles to get more of a true rotation.

…but the more Brush Angle Presets you create, the longer your Brush Presets List is going to get.

So now, we’ll create custom Actions so you can use the Function Keys to quickly select each brush you set up for rotation.

(In part two, I’ll show you how to assign those brushes to your Wacom Express Keys,Touch Ring or Radial Menu.)

STEP 6: Create A New Action Set:

Create a new Action Set which eventually will contain all of your Rotating Brushes.

Now go to the Actions Panel and create a new Action Set by clicking on the small folder icon at the bottom.

Name the new Action Set“Brush Rotation.”

STEP 7: Create Your First Brush Angle Action:

Create a new Action that automagically selects the first angle for each rotation brush. Assign the action to a Function Key.

With your new Action Set selected, Create a New Action by clicking on the little icon at the bottom of the Actions Panel. (It looks like a piece of paper with a folded corner.)

Photoshop will now ask you to specify a few details.

Just like with the brush angles, call this first one “BrushName Rotation”

Select “F1” from the first drop-down menu.

Later on, you can use the Command or Shift Modifier Keys to increase the number of rotatable brushes in your set up.

A recorded Action that automagically selects a specific Brush Preset.

Now, go to the bottom of the Actions Panel, click “Record” and then immediately select your first Brush Angle Preset a.k.a. “BrushName_Angle_U_D” from the Brush Presets Panel.

STEP 8: Set Up More Brushes For Rotation:

Instead of scrolling through an endless list of similarly-named brushes to find the angle you want, you can just select one brush angle for each from your Actions Panel and then use your Previous/ Next Hotkey to rotate!

Reader Interactions

Comments

that is very interesting. But I have to ask: If I do four actions for one brush angle per action, will I have to do this for every brush I use or will it somehow apply to other brushes automatically? (I guess it will only work for one single brush)

I am mostly using many different brushes (I created for myself) and in this case, for me, it is indeed easier to rotate the brush completely by hand.

However, using actions, to per example set up special layers with settings kinda quickly, will be very useful once I created every shortcut I need.

Hello again, wow, that’s starting to get indeed very interesting. I might try this with the two or three most used brushes and will see how it works for me. It should help to create a better workflow.

By the way, something others might have figured out as well already, but I would like to share this: It is a way to extend the use of any brush.

Open a new file and fill the canvas with black, maybe a 500×500 file, then mask the whole sqare-canvas and save it as a texture. It should show up in the brush menu section “texture” (below scattering) as a full black square. It will provide a completely new way to handle brushes.

Depending on the blending mode of the black texture (it’s important that the black square has no frame, it should be completely black, so the tiles cause a closed black area) you can make the brush even more transparent, or super crisp (play around with the sliders a bit).

I think it was via setting the black texture to multiply, that will let you increase the brush- transparency the more you move the slider to the right. Use “minimum depth” to 100% to apply transparency to the whole pressure-range of the brush, or play around with the brush to extend the transparency on pressure.

If a blending option or slider seems to have no effect at all, try to invert the texture by checking the box next to the preview thumbnail. There is a lot of stuff you can do with your brush that way.

If you have a certain setting that you want to apply to any brush, just lock the texture-section and any brush you choose will have the same effect applied to it. Sadly, if the brushes already use a texture, it won’t work that well (as the black texture will replace the other texture that’s used in this case). If you want to use any brush normally, just unlock the texture-section and it won’t apply to any brush you choose.

If it’s too confusing I could set up a little tutorial and link it to you, maybe it’s useful. If this were an idea, where should I include the link so you will definitely see it? (If you are interested in what I explored recently)

And if you figure something out by yourself (one should easily figure out what blending modes and sliders are doing with the brush), I hope it will inspire you for a new tutorial. But in any case just tell me when I can help a little bit.

So, I was asked to post up something I discovered while playing in Photoshop and while on facebook last night. I came across this tutorial and thought, “hey this is the missing link to rotating brushes with the touch ring on my Wacom!”

I was struggling my hardest to find ways that you can simply rotate the brush by using the Touch ring on your wacom Intuos Tablet. Which I’m sure is something many of you have been boggled about.

I’m operating off of an Intuos Pro touch tablet and the ring works great for this procedure! I just didn’t know how to do it until I found this Tutorial. Which teaches me exactly how to record those brush actions.

SO, to debunk some things and get rid of some stuff like the radial menu and clear up some hotkeys pay attention closely and hopefully Chris will work out another tutorial that simplifies this. Now, if you DO NOT have a tablet like this or a spiral/touch ring on the side then this full tutorial is great for you to learn about setting actions to hotkeys and all.

Chris does a wonderful job of expressing how to rotate your brushes to the right angles you want and saving them as brush presets (steps 1-7). So, follow up until this point and forget about the radial menus!!

After setting your brushes and rotating them to at least “8” different angles (full 360 degrees) save them as about 8 different brushes in your presets. (You can all do more than 8 rotations, hell you can all do 360 rotations per brush, but well nobody will do that unless they want to, but to keep it simple, do the eight basic turns.

So instead of setting all of the hotkeys set to keystrokes, (i.e. the F1 – F10 + shift/command keyboard shortcuts.)
(I’m guessing we all want to save some of those keys for other commands in Photoshop!))

After saving the brushes you want to rotate you need to address your Wacom preferences and your keyboard shortcuts in photoshop. From this point on I’ll make it an easy list of steps to understand!

2nd:
After rotating to all 8 angles and saving them, open your keyboard shortcuts (under edit).

3rd: Go to tools and locate the previous/next brush options. You’re going to want to assign two hotkeys to them, right now I have , as my previous brush and . as my next brush.

4th: Open your Wacom tablet preferences.

5th: Now just like in Chris’ tutorial, you will want to locate the “touch ring” tab instead of the “radial menu” tab.

6th: You’re going to want to toggle one of your touch ring options (there should be 4) to a keystroke and after selecting “keystroke” you set your Previous and Next brush keyboard shortcuts (, and . for me)

That’s it! After that, go into your brushes and click on the first brush set that you rotated, toggle the option on your touch ring and you’re able to spin it and rotate between next and last brushes. This will also allow you to quickly switch between brushes while rotating.
So if you favor two or three brushes, keep them together so you can just spin and switch!

Hope this helps Chris as well as many artists improve their workflow and have fun!

Please visit my facebook where I’ll post up screenshots of what your brush presets should look like once you’ve rotated them. I’ll also always be available to answer questions and help others get this process set up. Afterwards we all probably have some brush organizing to do (which I’m really bad at :P).

So visit my facebook, add and check out my wall, where I post my artwork and screenshots and also discuss further on this technique!

No problem Chris! Very very happy to help out with that! 🙂 Always here to figure out new things!

I’d also be sure to keep in mind the utilization of the x and y axis and setting up your brush rotations to match every dimension of angles.

So while you can rotate your brush to 90 degrees and -90, keeping the horizontal positioned brush either in the middle (at 0°) or somewhere at the top or bottom of your brushes (not sure yet, possibly not even needed).

Hell rotate it 180 degrees and make use of the x and y.

After that you can rotate your brush in a full circle then flip it vertically or horizontally and make use of every dimension the brushes have to offer, (it’s more for specific brushes like tress and mountains, that can be used to paint in different perspectives).

All basic stuff I’m sure you know, but the x and y (flip) axis make the rotation more versatile. And that’s all I have to offer when it comes to this particular technique. 🙂

Hi Chris, thanks for the website, lots of informative and interesting articles and podcasts!

Regarding this tip, I was wondering why not use the tilt function (as opposed to rotation, tilt is available with the standard stylus of the Intuos line) of the tablet to control brush angle instead of controlling it manually, kind of like using the side of a pencil?
I know there’s probably reasons, like how awkward it can be to add tilt to the other arm motions involved in making a brush stroke, and how lower-end tablets (graphire, bamboo) apparently don’t support tilt. I’ve used the tilt function for years and occasionally it’s definitely not very helpful, not to mention that I don’t see a lot of professional artists do it this way, but I don’t think I could get by without it.

Just wondering if you might have your own reasons for not using the tilt function?

I think for me, another solution is using the canvas rotate tool. I have a harder time hitting certain angles cleanly and quickly anyway, so rotating the canvas to align with my best stroke is not only easier on my hand, but is kinda similar to rotating the brush…

Then again, I’d like to try this out, because there’s possibly some neat angles/solutions in trying to go for strokes I’m not used to & rotating the brush, than the canvas.

Could you say a few words about _how_ you use the brush angle for edge control? (Most of the brushes I’ve been using are round, so I don’t have much experience with this.) Do you usually line up the brush along the edge, perpendicular to the edge, or something in between? How is that affected by the kind of edge you’re going for?

Hey everyone, I saw this plug-in that was suggested by another artist called: Lazy Nezumi. Its a plug-in that works for many art programs. Anyway, I remember reading this article on edge control, so I thought I would share. Ok guys, happy painting.